Light-emitting diode (“LED”) based lighting is increasingly used in both commercial and domestic settings due to its efficiency, flexibility and low toxic material content. Solid-state LEDs are generally manufactured and packaged like other semiconductor products; that is, the LEDs are first fabricated in wafer form, then wafers are diced into individual LED chips that are assembled into individual packages. The packages then mount into products in a variety of ways. In this way, packaging cost is incurred for each individual LED, with this cost accumulating in each product that uses the LEDs.
Net brightness from a single point source is also an issue with LED based lighting. The current trend in solid-state lighting is to employ large LED chips and/or modules of LED chips that have been incorporated onto a printed circuit board (PCB) assembly. Management of manufacturing costs currently favors use of large LED chips (e.g., packaged chips that consume about one watt of electrical power and emit about 80 to 300 lumens of light) because lower numbers of chips and packages are used in a final product. However, users sometimes find the large LED chips uncomfortably bright. Furthermore, placement of large LED chips into a light fixture in an arrayed fashion (such as in lines or rectilinear grids) may result in the fixture projecting a distracting distribution of light. Managing heat transfer away from large LED chips and/or the PCB assemblies may also be problematic.